Balvenie Castle.

View from the courtyard looking back to the entrance.

Nothing special about this, just made both of us laugh. The sign says “Latrine chute and pit”.

Again nothing special about this photo, I believe this is just a storage cellar. What caught my eye was the building of the ceiling, it’s hundreds of rocks wedged in together to form the arch of the ceiling. This type of architecture provides substantial support for the floors above.

Here you can see the spiral staircase that was common in all of the castles. One thing we learned is that in a majority of the castles the staircase would start on the left hand side and wind clockwise up. In very few castles the staircase would start on the right hand side and wind up counter clockwise. We were told that the direction of the staircase depended on if the owner that the castle was left or right handed. The reason this played an important role was if the castle was attached, the owner would be able to have a sword fight easily instead of constantly hitting their sword into the side walls.

Aberlour distillery. This is the first distillery of our trip and the only one we did the tour for which was about 2 hours. Aberlour is one of my dads favorite scotches so he was very happy that we were able see it.

Here you see the copper kilns; these are hand made and they are different in shape depending on the distillery. During the tour we found out that the shape of the kiln plays a big role in the flavor of the end product.

The doorway to the tasting room! The black soot on the exterior of the building is actually residue from alcohol evaporating during the distilling process.

Here we are in the tasting room where they have casks maturing… behind a closed off wall with no way of entering it… I guess they didn’t trust us. In the sampling we had 6 glasses. The first was a clear liquid which is from the early stages of the distilling process… basically moonshine. It was pretty strong and the flavor was not that great;. the next few samples were much better. The oldest sample we had was a 16 year which was very nice if you are into scotch.

Here we have the Glenfiddich Distillery. This distillery is located right at the edge of Dufftown were we were staying for a majority of our trip. Neither one of us is a big Glenfiddich drinker so we just stopped by to grab a picture of their sign and distillery.